The NY Times recently did an article on Sapiosexuals – people’s whose erotic response is triggered by smart people.
I could relate. I suppose I’m a heterosexual sapiosexual, I’m turned on by really smart men. But it got me thinking about all the myriad of new sexual “labels”. Here’s a comprehensive list.
People who are attracted to anyone of any sexual identity are “pan-sexual”. People who are “less interested in sex”, they fall on the “asexuality spectrum”. “Skoliosexual,” describes sexual attraction to a non-binary identified individual. “Demisexual,” refers to a person “who does not experience sexual attraction unless they have already formed a strong emotional bond.” It seems like for every minor variation there is a new label.
I started wondering whether all these labels were ultimately helpful and why people felt the need for all these labels. I realized that it is probably a response to trying to make sense out of your own sexuality. If the current words don’t describe exactly how you feel, then you might feel the need to create a category to explain yourself and your sexual and romantic proclivities. It makes you feel “normal” and feeling normal seems to be a big issue for so many people. Maybe because popular media makes us all fee so abnormal sexually so much of the time.
But the truth is that I think that all this labeling is counter-productive. Really. Because then it makes us feel like there needs to be an explicit label that fits each of us perfectly and honestly, that’s just never going to happen. And maybe we should be thinking about this in a different way: We all have our very own sexual attractions. That’s part of making us who we are. And the same way no two people have the same exact taste-buds, probably no two people have the very same erotic map. And that’s a good thing! So maybe instead of trying to use external labels for ourselves we should just call ourselves: (insert you name here) sexual and leave it at that. Maybe being (insert your name) sexual is a PERFECT DESCRIPTION of who you are and is really and truly perfectly normal. And that’s FINE.